Chapter 20 #2
Abe had gone very still above her at the name. Marielle felt it more than saw it, the stillness coming off him, and she knew what it was. She said nothing of it, and kept her eyes on Samson and kept on, because the moment for that was not now and might not be hers to choose at all.
“Where are they?” she said. “Flores, and what’s left of his men. The ones that rode out of my town tonight. Where do they go to ground?”
“A ranch,” Samson said. “Just over the river, on the Mexican side of it. Three miles south, near enough, of the town and the crossing both. That’s their western muster, where they’ve been gathering the men and the goods for the western hand of it.” He looked at her steady.
“That’s where the men that burned Colinas Rojas tonight are riding this very minute, if they’re not there already.
To lie up safe across a line, and laugh, because they know what you’ll find when you go looking.
You’ll not get the army to step across that river after them. You’ll not get the Rangers across it.
There’s a treaty and there’s a line and the line’s the whole beauty of the thing to them. They do their killing on this bank and they go home and sleep easy on the other, and there’s not a badge in this country can follow them over to trouble their sleep.”
Marielle took that in and held it, turned it over once and set it down somewhere cold and exact inside her. Three miles south, over the river. She didn’t say anything to it yet. She’d hold it until she’d had the last thing out of him, the thing she’d come two years and a burned town to reach.
“My father,” she said. The edge went out of her voice on it, not softer but lower, the way you lower your voice over a thing that matters more than the things around it.
“You knew him. You rode at his stirrup. You came to my house twice in the dark, the last year, to warn him off whatever this was. Now you tell me what happened to him.”
Samson was quiet a moment, and when he came to answer her he came to it slow, picking the words, and she watched his ruined face the whole while for the lie in it, the way her father had taught her to watch a man’s face for the lie, and she did not find one there.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I want you to hear that plain, and I want you to believe it of me, because it’s the truth and it’s the worst thing I’ve got left in my hands to give you tonight.
I do not know what happened to Emmett Vaughn.
I’d give a good deal to be able to hand you the where and the how of it and let you stop wondering. I can’t. I genuinely don’t know.”
He held her eyes through it. “But I’ve got an idea of it. An idea I’d stake what’s left of me on.”
“Then give me the idea.”
“Ask the mayor,” Samson said. “Ask Nash. Whatever was done to your father, it was done under his roof or near enough to it to make no difference. I would put my last breath on it that Nash knows the where and the how and the why of it, even supposing his own hands stayed clean of the actual doing, which I’d not suppose for a minute myself. ”
He didn’t look away from her. “That’s the whole of my idea.
It’s not proof and it’s not a place to dig and it’s not the answer you rode out two years hunting.
But you asked me for the honest thing, and the honest thing is a name.
Ask Nash. Make him tell you. There’s nobody else left alive that can. ”
She studied him a long moment. “And why should I believe you don’t know it your own self?” she said. “You disappeared the morning after he did. One day. If you’d no hand in it and no knowledge of it, why was that the morning you chose to run?”
“Because I didn’t choose it. Mateo chose it for me.” His mouth twisted on the memory.
“Flores came to me that same morning your father didn’t come home.
Told me a federal paper had come down out of Arkansas with my name on it.
Treason. The family business catching up with the last of the family at last. Told me I was a wanted man now, and no further use to him sitting behind a deputy’s desk where a marshal might come and collect me and start asking the kind of questions that lead other places. ”
He shook his head slow. “But he didn’t cut me loose, either. A wanted man who knows what I knew, walking around free with a grievance and nothing left to lose, that’s a danger to a careful man.
So he wanted me close. Close and quiet and dug in out of sight where he could lay his hand on me when he wanted one and the law never could.
That’s the why of the hole in the woods, the whole of it.
Not hiding from the law, or not only. Hiding where Flores could keep me, the same as Jeremiah, only my cellar had a dirt roof and a willow door instead of a lock. ”
His voice went rough and low. “I ran the morning after your father vanished because that was the morning Flores told me to vanish, and I’ve stayed vanished two years on his say-so.
The way the timing of it fell right up against your father was Flores’s doing and the world’s, and not one thing I ever chose or wanted.
That’s the truth of why, and it’s an ugly one, but it won’t change for your not believing it. ”
Marielle stood up out of the crouch. Her knees had gone stiff under her and she didn’t notice.
She had a direction now, a real one, three miles south across a river, and she had a name to put the last hard question to, a name and a door, and that was more than she’d carried out of two years of Hollis’s careful nothing and Austin’s polite cabinets full of inquiries that led nowhere.
It wasn’t her father. It wasn’t an answer.
But it was a place to stand and ask, which was a thing she hadn’t had since the morning he didn’t come home.
“Ask Nash,” she said, half to the dark, half to herself, fixing it.
“Ask Nash,” Samson said again from down against the post, and there was nothing left in him after it.
He put his head back against the wood and shut his sunk eyes and was done, emptied out, a man who’d carried a thing two years and finally set the whole of it down in the dirt of a stranger’s yard and had nothing now to do but sit in the dark beside it.